Authors:
Steve Mannheimer
1
;
Mexhid Ferati
2
;
Donald Huckleberry
3
and
Mathew Palakal
2
Affiliations:
1
School of Informatics, IUPUI, United States
;
2
IUPUI School of Informatics, United States
;
3
Indiana University, United States
Keyword(s):
Audeme, sound, Blind and visually impaired, Children, Cognitive long-term memory, Education.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cognitive Informatics
;
Health Information Systems
;
Human-Machine Interfaces for Disabled Persons
Abstract:
In this paper we demonstrate the utility of short, nonverbal sound symbols—called “audemes”—in the encoding and recalling of text-based educational materials. In weekly meetings over a school year with blind and visually impaired pre-college students, we explored their capacity for long-term memory of individual audemes, audeme sequences, and textual content presented in conjunction with these. Through interviews and group discussions, we also explored the ability of these students to create intuitive narratives enabling memory of complex audemes and series of audemes. Further, we explored the mnemonic power of positive affect in audemes, and the impact of thematic association of information-to-audeme. Our results showed that the use of audemes can improve encoding and recall of educational content in the visually impaired population. The ultimate goal of our work is implementation of an “acoustic interface” allowing users to access a database of audemes and associated text-to-speec
h content.
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